From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Jun 11 2003 - 13:54:50 MDT
On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> --- BillK <bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> > Why not invest for income?
> >
> > You should be able to get 5% return.
In fact Dave Kekich has audited results of fund managers
that can over several to many years (e.g. a decade) pull
off something like 20-30% returns. You just have to be
very good at picking your investments. E.g. look at the
performance of Amazon over the last 12-18 months.
[big snip]
> $200 billion would not pay off the entire US debt, but
> neither would it be a totally insignificant fraction
> thereof.
True. The political question is how long it will be before
the "debt hawks" come back into power. During the '80s they
were sufficiently active to bring some fiscal restraint to
politics.
Now there are a couple of interesting outs --
The first would be the development of robust molecular
nanotechnology -- then the cost of material goods falls
(by probably an order of magnitude or more) and so one
could raise taxes and people/corporations would hardly notice.
The second would be the development of robust AI probably
bringing about the singularity. In that case things like
government debts may become irrelevant.
Now whether the U.S. (or the world supporting the U.S.
debt load) are sufficient to provide the investment that
would cause (1) or (2) to happen remains an open question.
The difficulty in the analysis of what the U.S. is currently
doing involves our inability to strongly predict probable futures.
Robert
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